The Quigless Clinic-Hospital

1900 - Institutional Event

How much difference can one person make? Dr. Milton Douglas Quigless defied the odds and the conventions of his time to make medical care available to African Americans in Edgecombe County.

In 1936, just out of medical school, he arrived in the small town of Tarboro with $7 in his pocket and a desire to care for people. The need was certainly there. Tarboro’s only hospital was restricted to whites. Local white doctors did not usually treat African Americans, and the town’s only black physician had died years earlier.

Denied privileges at the hospital, Dr. Quigless set up an office in an abandoned fish market. He struggled to provide adequate care and perform surgery, not only in his meager office but also in patients’ homes. Many were tenant farmers with no electricity and poor sanitary conditions that bred typhoid, dysentery and tuberculosis. To give the best care possible, Quigless consulted with specialists around the state. And, as most country doctors did in the days before penicillin, he improvised and occasionally used folk medical treatments he’d learned.

But local prejudices and segregation laws continued to frustrate Quigless.  In 1947, with his life savings and a $37,000 loan, he purchased and converted his office building into a 25-bed clinic. “All the patients I’d been seeing out in the country, a lot of them died, you know, before I built the place here,” he recalled. “From the day I started, it was filled up.”

The Quigless Hospital developed an excellent reputation. During the 1950s, white patients began to come for treatment, too. Breaking tradition with most Southern hospitals of that time, Quigless provided one door and one waiting room for all patients, white and black.

In 1974, the hospital closed when Dr. Quigless joined the staff of the new Edgecombe County General Hospital and moved his patients there. But he maintained an office in the old hospital until shortly before his death in 1997. Today his son, Dr. Milton Quigless, Jr., is a well-known surgeon in Raleigh, keeping the Quigless name very much a part of North Carolina health care.

Dr. Milton Douglas Quigless, around 1980.

(L) The fish market where Dr. Quigless set up his office, about 1938. (R) The building after its conversion to the Quigless Clinic-Hospital, about 1948,

Operating on a Shoestring

Twenty-five beds, an operating room and infant delivery rooms. Women’s and children’s wards, private rooms and a nursery. An X-ray department, pharmacy, kitchen and nurses’ living quarters. To build and equip a clinic with those facilities in 1947, Dr. Quigless had to supplement his limited funds with a lot of ingenuity and persistence.

 He combed the nation for low-cost equipment and supplies. His operating light came from a decommissioned World War II aircraft carrier. A grateful patient sewed surgical gowns for the new hospital. And Quigless salvaged his operating table from the trash outside a Greenville hospital. “I got it, cleaned it up, and it worked beautifully,” he said.

As the only doctor in the hospital, Dr. Quigless worked, too—constantly. He admitted the patients, diagnosed their problems and performed all the surgeries. During a typical day, he might perform a hysterectomy, plus several tonsillectomies, appendectomies, hernia operations and more. On top of that, he prescribed all the medicines and made all the hospital rounds. He also instructed all the staff, monitored their work and paid their salaries. Amazingly, he even continued to make house calls throughout the county.

After civil rights legislation and changing attitudes had desegregated the practice of medicine in North Carolina, Dr. Quigless was invited to join the staff of the new Edgecombe County General Hospital in Tarboro. About the same time, new hospital safety laws would have required him to tear down his hospital and rebuild it. So he decided to close his facility in 1974, moving his patients to the new county hospital. Of his reception there, he said, “I couldn’t have been treated better.”

A recreation of the Quigless Hospital operating room.

A few of the surgical tools used by Dr. Quigless, the hospital’s only physician.

Dr. Quigless examines old equipment at the closed hospital in Tarboro, 1995.

Separate and Unequal Medical Care

In the 1930s, when Dr. Milton Quigless was beginning to practice medicine, health care in North Carolina was decidedly a matter of race. If you were African American, you might be admitted to a white hospital for surgical procedures unavailable elsewhere, but you stayed in a segregated ward. If your own doctor was black, as was usually the case, he couldn’t treat you at that hospital. Hospitals and doctors’ offices that did treat patients of both races had separate entrances and waiting rooms marked “For Negroes” or “For Coloreds.” But in many communities, African Americans had to rely on separate clinics, doctors and pharmacists.

Segregation severely limited your chances of receiving regular, scientific medical care. North Carolina averaged one doctor for every 7,600 African Americans in those days. Even by 1950, only 13 hospitals served the needs of the state’s African American population.

 The move toward civil rights was hotly debated in medicine. Some hospitals began integrating their staffs in the 1950s, with many members of the medical profession pressing for social equality. The trend increased rapidly in the early ’60s, when receiving federal funds depended on having a desegregated staff. With the sweeping civil rights legislation of the mid-60s, medical care became more equitable. But North Carolina still struggles to provide rural populations of all races with affordable, high-quality care.

A segregated ward at Duke Hospital around 1940.

Good Samaritan Hospital of Charlotte, around 1940, one of just thirteen hospitals for African Americans in the state.